The Blog of Death

Donald Justice

Donald Rodney Justice, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and educator, died on Aug. 6 of pneumonia. He was 78.

The Miami native earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Miami, a master's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a doctorate from the University of Iowa. In 1954, Justice received a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in poetry, which he used to visit Europe and write. Upon his return to the states, he spent the next four decades traveling around the country and teaching creative writing classes at several colleges and universities.

In between lectures, Justice penned nearly a dozen poetry collections, including "The Summer Anniversaries" and "Orpheus Hesitated Beside the Black River." His latest book, "Collected Poems," will be released this week. Justice's formalist verse appeared in numerous magazines, such as Poetry, The New Yorker and The Paris Review. He wrote the libretto for Edwin London's opera, "The Death of Lincoln," and co-edited "The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette" with Robert Mezey.

In addition to the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for "Selected Poems," Justice also won the Lamont Award, the Bollingen Prize and the Lannen Literary Award. He served as a chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. A collection of his manuscripts resides at the University of Delaware Library.

• Read Donald Justice's Poetry

Posted on August 17, 2004 3:22 AM